Naviant Monday released an e-mail marketing product based on its database of more than 34 million addresses — but which could raise the eyebrows of anti-spam advocates.
The Newtown Square, Pennsylvania-based company focuses on online customer acquisition and retention products — including renting e-mail lists and selling turnkey products that incentivize product registration with rewards.
Now, its new WiredMail product suite aims to beef up its product line. The suite is based on the company’s High Tech Household File, which it says includes 34 million Internet-using households that have opted into receiving marketing messages.
The suite’s Prospector tool is aimed at customer acquisition. Based on Naviant’s household file, the database contains opt-in e-mail and postal addresses, as well as demographic and geographic information. Rate card pricing for Prospector list rentals begins at $150 CPM.
WiredMail Append is a customer retention tool, which allows marketers to find e-mail addresses for their existing customers, and to add those addresses to their house files. Many traditional marketers are eager to get into the e-mail marketing game, but they don’t yet have enough of their existing customers’ e-mail addresses to make the effort worthwhile. With this product, Naviant is seeking to meet that need, charging $0.30 to $0.65 for each address it appends to an existing house file contact.
Therein lies the rub, inasmuch as anti-spam advocates are concerned. Many critics of this sort of policy contend that just because a customer has opted into receiving offline marketing messages doesn’t necessarily mean they also wish to receive e-mail from the company.
In effect, sending a customer e-mail that they haven’t requested could be construed as spam.
Naviant, however, doesn’t seem to buy into this philosophy, maintaining that delivering e-mails to existing customers is another way of broadening marketers’ dialogue with customers.
“We are always looking for ways to expand our product and service offerings to help our clients build strong relationships with their customers and prospects,” said David Braunstein, director of online products at Naviant. “In an effort to reach their target customers, marketers are striving to effectively develop and execute online marketing campaigns. By offering this suite of digital marketing products, we have answered the needs of our clients by providing them an end-to-end direct marketing solution.”
WiredMail also includes Web-based Manager software, which oversees the launch and management of an e-mail marketing campaign. It also has plug-ins that allow for data collection from Prospector and Append campaigns. Annual service contracts for the program run around $7,500 per month.
